Wednesday, December 14, 2016

For the last two years, University Archives has been working with the Internet Archive and their Archive-It member service to capture and preserve numerous UNCG-affiliated websites. You can learn more about the beginning of this work in January 2015 in a previous blog post. Now, in addition to seeing the versions of the site that we have archived since 2015, you can view all of the earlier captures of many of these sites done by the Internet Archive in one location.

You can quickly and easily explore how a single department's web presence has changed over the years (and, in many cases, access documents and other information about the department/unit's work that was never available in another format). For example, the Elliott University Center website has been captured 150 times, with the earliest being on August 19, 2000. On that earliest site, you can learn about the EUC Renewal Project which began in 2000.

The website of the Office of Housing and Residence Life has been captured 232 times, going back to January 19, 2004. Using this site, a researcher could examine the changes in housing rates from 2004 (where the site proudly advertises that "all rooms have ethernet connections for each student!") to 2016.

Unfortunately, many of these earliest crawls can't display some images, and some of the links will not work (particularly if they link to another web domain). And we are still working with the Internet Archive on a few small issues with missing crawls. But, this web archiving work still gives us a great opportunity to explore the changes to UNCG's online presence while also preserving the valuable and often unique information on those sites for current and future researchers.

If you have any questions about our web archiving work, please feel free to contact us! Also, if you have a UNCG-affiliated site that is currently not being archived (meaning the domain can't be found in a search of this site), let us know. This includes websites that belong to departments, centers, student groups, faculty/staff groups, and other UNCG-affiliated organizations.